Laura Bessarati

I'm Laura Bessarati.

Stevie, it looks like the market is going to fall for the 10th time over the past 11 sessions.

Of course, there's been a lot for investors to digest over the past 12 hours or so with tensions in the Middle East seeming to escalate overnight with more missiles being launched.

And then today with the RBA interest rate decision where they did in fact raise interest rates for the third straight meeting.

So three rate hikes in a row.

So as I mentioned, third rate hike in a row, but this was widely expected.

So there was roughly an 80% chance that they would hike.

So really not a surprise.

In terms of the 4.35% where the cash rate is sitting now, that's actually its highest level since December 2018.

2024.

So what this has done is essentially undo all the rate cuts that we got last year in 2025.

So we got three rate cuts over the course of 2025 in Feb, May and August.

So we're essentially back to where we started.

Now we did listen to the

press conference by Michelle Bullock an hour after the decision was handed down and also looked at the statement of monetary policy accompanying that decision.

So interestingly, we did see eight of nine board members voting to raise interest rates, only one of them voting to keep rates unchanged.

That's different to the last meeting where it was

split decision.

In terms of the market reaction, we did see the market immediately fall.

So it was already down by half a percent ahead of the decision, but we steepened losses.